When Goldenhorse released their first album Riverhead, the album snuck into the stores without fanfare and took 52 weeks to climb to No 1, largely thanks to incessant touring and pure word of mouth. To date, it has sold an astonishing 50,000 copies to all kinds of New Zealanders.
Ah, so much for those carefree days of yore. This week, the new Goldenhorse album Out of the Moon hits the shops, and now it’s a different ball game. “You make your first record,” says Goldenhorse stalwart Geoff Maddock laconically, “and no one knows who you are. They can’t categorise you because they haven’t heard you. Then they do, and they can, or they can try in various ways. And suddenly it becomes – so you want to make a new record? Well, make it like the first one, would you please, say the record company. Because we think these are the sort of people who listen to your music and, no, they’re not going to like that.”
So far, the group have been too busy finishing the album to think overly much about the levels of expectation out there. “For me, it doesn’t make much difference,” says lead singer Kirsten Morell, who has now reverted to the correct spelling of her family name. “It might hit me now, but there’s been no reflective second album self-consciousness going on, not for me personally.”
The group began laying down the tracks for this album in 2003. One track called “Alien” was recorded in its entirety back then. Almost all the rest were finished in November-December last year, with the song “Fish” being knocked off in February this year. More cohesive than Riverhead, the new album does capture far more of the sound and spirit of the band’s live performances, and it gets better as it goes along. On the last few tracks, there is far more interplay between Morell and the rest of the band. Elsewhere, the group functions largely as just a platform for Morell’s gorgeous voice.
“Yeah, yeah,” Morell replies intensely. “I’m glad you say that, because we spent a lot of time on the pace of the album to put the really challenging ones at the end. We put the lighter ones up front [check out the classic disco rhythm on the opening track] and put the more esoteric ones to the middle, and at the end. That was a definite decision by all of us. We really put all the rock’n’roll ones up front, and then ‘Alien’ and ‘Fish’ – that are really harder to digest – in the middle, and then those emotionally vocal ones at the end.” Originally, Morell wanted to call the album Heaven of Apes – a title she loves, and which now graces the publishing company.
Each of the standout tracks on the album has its own back story:
“Trinkity Trunk.” The album’s arena rock anthem, likely to inspire much lighting of lighters and to and fro swaying out front. The song is built around a chiming, almost Christmas carol-like, line on the guitar reminiscent of Tom Verlaine, Maddock’s main guitar hero. “Right. It’s got a Celtic feeling to it,” Maddock begins. “A kind of folk, maypole type thing … and because it’s got a 6/8 feel to it also, you do get that swaying, rollicking-type thing going.”
Morell wrote this one, she recalls, on the piano, incorporating the guitar line into a mood inspired by her reading of John Le Carré’s espionage classic The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Initially, she wanted to use that title for the song itself. Reading Le Carré, she says, left her feeling very homesick for Cornwall, where she grew up – until Thatcherism made her father’s small business no longer tenable, and which led indirectly to her migration to New Zealand. And that title “Trinkity Trunk”? It began, she says, as just an onomatopoeic working title based on the guitar line, but it stuck.
“Out of the Moon.” The title track has an easy, languorous feel to it, full of moon and June/life-is-but-a-dream type lyrics. Couldn’t this be a 1940s or 50s song, something from a different era entirely? “Yeah,” says Morell, “I think of it as being a Roy Orbison tune. Definitely a tune from a different era.” Because of the song’s delicate mood, it can also be a hard song to play live. Lose that languid feel on stage, she agrees, and the song can easily sound flat. “But then ‘Maybe Tomorrow’ was like that at first, too. If the rhythm section fell apart, the whole song would collapse …”
Doesn’t the album title suggest something silvery – a bit of a Stevie Nicks sense of mystery in muslin? “No, no. Don’t you dare mention Stevie Nicks,” she says. “That is such an easy comparison. I hate Fleetwood Mac.” She’s far happier with the Joni Mitchell/Alison Goldfrapp vocal comparisons, and with the way her voice has been recorded – Murray Grindlay came in to produce her vocals – on this album.
“Used to Think.” Morell’s voice is undeni-ably lovely, to a point where its sweet tone can, on some occasions, all but defeat the lyric. When she sings “get lost baby” here for instance, there isn’t much of what you might call riot grrl venom in the delivery. Is this the curse of being Goldenhorse – a terrific bunch of people but intrinsically, compulsively just too darned nice to have a lot of edge to their music?
Not at all, Morell says, digging in her toes. “When we play live, it is pretty edgy and you couldn’t say that songs like ‘Riverhead’ aren’t dark.” Bfm, she adds, considers them edgy enough for their playlist, and she then goes on to make a far better point. “A lot of boy bands like the Strokes have such processed vocals that what you’re hearing is the filter, not the natural tone. With us, what you are getting are the natural tones.” Which in their case do tend to sound warmer, and sweeter.
Personally, she’s so over the distinction that the criticism implies. To her mind, the whole mainstream/indie divide is now passé. “Indie is just so basketed these days. It’s a genre I used to really, really like in my teens. Now, it’s like, I don’t want to be told what to listen to because it’s indie. The whole point was that you went and found it. Now it’s on TV [she cites Intellectual Property on C4 by way of example] fronted by some minx being as kooky as she can possibly be.”
“Cowgirl Lament.” Perhaps her favourite cut on the album. “I really enjoyed doing this. It was one of those [recorded in] 10 minutes songs. It’s cool. I always wanted to write one of those ‘death ghost girl comes back to haunt her lover’ songs, like ‘Streets of Laredo’.” It’s not the only haunting moment on the album. Even on the fluffy opening track, Morell powers up into the higher registers – hear how she sings “luh-uh-uh-ove”, and melt – without losing any warmth or clarity.
As for the band’s future plans. Last year, Act Party’s Muriel Newman publicly attacked Maddock – “F--- off, bitch,” he says cheerily, by way of a return shot – for being on the artists’ benefit, but that is no longer so. Buoyed by their recent influx of funds, Goldenhorse are off to Los Angeles and London in May for at least a four-month stay. The same tactics of talent plus slog that won over New Zealand are about to be applied to the task of world domination. “You’ve got to be in the territory to win over the territory,” Morell says with typical honesty. “We’re never going to be a band that rides in on some hip wave.”